


The Joke About the Dog

by nimmieamee



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dark, Gen, first person POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-04
Updated: 2015-03-04
Packaged: 2018-03-16 08:18:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3481010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rumlow stared at me and said, “Didn’t think you knew you were an I, Win.”</p><p>My name isn’t Win. But people call me all kinds of things and Win made sense. Because this is what I do – I guess I’m a winning card. Though at the time I didn’t think of myself that way.</p><p>But you’re wrong if you think I didn’t think of myself. I was an I.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Joke About the Dog

Now I remember lots of things that happened, or some of them.

It isn’t that I couldn’t remember anything before, but that there was no point in remembering then. I never bothered to remember, for example, the shuddering elevated metal cars, loops of ugly writing on the walls, used condoms under the seats, paint blocking up the windows, very young men packed inside making faces at each other, threatening each other. They asked me once if I’d like to see Brooklyn. I said yes. So I went on this journey. Inside the metal car the young men put on a show for us. These boys — I think some were around fourteen. They had knives, and bits of chain. On one end of the car, a woman carefully ignored them. On the other end an older woman gave a terrified shriek. My companion said, “Open a window. It stinks in here.”

And it did because on one long grey seat there was a snuffling, shrouded figure wrapped in papers. It gave off a smell. I’ve never stunk like that. I’m not always perfectly tended to, but I am clean.

I reached up a hand and couldn’t lift the lever to open the partition at the top of the window. It was stuck with paint and something gummy. So I broke the glass. No one cared. The young men were circling each other. My companion told me that in their blood there might be some contamination. So if the blood began to fly I couldn’t touch it, or let it mingle with any of my blood. Or if the contamination came out in sweat, I couldn’t touch the sweat.

I thought this was stupid. I couldn’t be destroyed by sweat.

One young man caught a hit in the thigh. He hissed and his blood ran down his dirty blue-white jeans. My jeans were dark; that hides bloodstains.

My companion was now offering the occasional observation to move things along. He put a hand on one of the poles and pushed his face forward so anyone could hear him and he said, “Listen, don’t worry. Kids around here are fucking fags. They won’t really fight. Too scared.” He said this like he was talking to me, but he wasn’t. He was talking to the skinny boys with dark eyes and dark hands and more youth in one shaking, reckless fingertip than he’d ever had in his whole body.

He wasn’t old. I’m not old, not to look at me. But any way you think about it it’s not a thing you measure in looks or years: youth.

My companion had dark eyes too, but his skin was hard and pale olive and his shirt was expensive. He was proud of it. He always tried to say he was this kind of faithful person. He had faith in the shirt, in the gleaming gold watch somebody had given him, in the fight that was gonna happen, in the State, in me. Otherwise he had no faith. He’d say all the time, complaining, that he’d lost faith in this or that, or had faith taken away. He loved that. He was new to us but he was capable. He was leadership material. This was when because when his unit failed at something and he’d say, “Now you’ve wrecked my fucking faith in you,” and he’d shake his head.

I knew in my bones that faith – whatever it is – isn’t something anyone else can wreck or take from you. I know this. The State knew it. I think everyone knows it who really has faith, but not my escort – he didn’t know it. Rumlow. That was his name. And he was always claiming to lose his faith in people, which I think is the claim anybody has when they really have no faith in people.

He spurred them on and I watched. It was useful. There’s a reckless, cornered, dog-fight that I’ve perfected and it comes from lots of places, but in a small way it comes from how familiar I am with things like this, how I learn and take things like this on. When I’m not shocked I’m very adaptable; I’d be useless otherwise; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Rumlow was supposed to be adapting, learning it too, but he couldn’t. He had on an expensive shirt and a gold watch and he had a name. I had nothing. The trick of nothing is that people are so afraid of it – these boys with nothing but their reputations were more afraid of it than most, which is why Rumlow’s taunts had such an effect. But there’s no point to being afraid of nothing, because when you’re nothing or close to nothing you fight in this way, with this element of surprise and uncaring.

You’d surprise yourself if you had it in you to care, but you don’t. You don’t have care; you have nothing, so you have nothing to care about. I’d already learned this from my visits to the cellblocks where the State said I had to watch a single murderer set on a man who’d been falsely accused while the guards stood by, bored; and I’d learned it by visiting hot places where children were given guns; and I’d learned it in facilities where numb, bleeding people were questioned until they would say or do anything to make it stop.

This is dog-misery. I mean it looks like misery in other people; if it’s in you, it doesn’t feel like misery. It doesn’t feel like anything. To Rumlow, who had a shirt and a watch, it looked like a huge jump down from his place in the world. So he’d never reach this kind of desperation. But I’m always there. So I can watch these children tear into eachother and learn from it.

The youngest-looking one, maybe thirteen, lifted himself onto the grey seat, pulling a howl out of the huddled mass of newspaper. And he didn’t say, “Shut up,” which I think most people would have – Rumlow would have – because this would be a chance to assert themselves. When you do this you lose sight of the goal. You become stuck in admiring yourself. You marvel at how, by some lucky accident, you’ve pushed someone else haltingly to the doorstep of the dog-misery.

But this boy didn’t care about that. I remember he had long, curling, black lashes; he had pale skin; his hair was a straight-up black box of fuzz; that around his neck he had a golden cross; that he’d dropped a sack on the floor when he’d jumped up, and what was inside spilled out, and it was a poison-red drink, cheap, twenty-five cents, and a sandwich with some cheese and meat, like the kind maybe his mother might’ve prepared.

But how could he have had a mother? He must’ve had nothing. Or at least he’d chosen nothing, put his faith in nothing. Because he stepped on the bum and knew they weren’t a threat, and he reached up a skinny hand and broke the flickering light above the seat. The old woman screamed again. The other boys tensed up, if they were smart, and said, “Oh shit,” when they weren’t. Even the other woman, the bored one, crammed herself against the wall, tried to make herself small. In that part of the car the lights went out, on, out. He didn’t care about the blood on his hands. He found a nice good shard of glass in the broken light. He brought it down.

Blood came up from the bigger boy standing beneath him, the boy who’d been winning, who’d smashed someone’s skull against a seat. The blood came up in a loop, like the shape of the writing on the doors. The bigger boy put a hand to his neck, where he had a tattoo of someone’s name, and the smaller boy jumped on him, and pounded him down with the shard of glass.

Rumlow leaned back. He was scared of what he thought was contaminated blood, but he was also excited. He put a hand on the gummy lever and pulled himself up so that he could see from over my head. Now all these young men were frozen; the shard of glass arcing up and down surprised them. Some tried to move away, but they were trapped here until the car could come to a stop. Some tried to move forward to stop the smaller boy, but they were too scared, they’d seen now what somebody who chose nothing could do.

So when the car stopped they mostly said muffled curses and left, leaving the body there with this small figure panting on top of it. Through the windows at the edge of the car, facing the windows of the next car, I could see policemen. They’d been peering in, they’d seen the whole thing. They didn’t come to collect the body. They didn’t say anything when the boy with the shard of glass stood and left the car, abandoning the sack lunch from some mother. The women both stood at opposite ends of the car and hurried out. The doors closed. It was me and Rumlow and the stinking homeless man, nursing his foot and cursing, and underneath him a body lying in maybe-contaminated blood and glass. The train jolted forward and then Rumlow said, “Hey!” and cursed.

Someone had reached in through the hole in the window, found his hand on the lever, and ripped off his watch. Rumlow could never get it back now. The train was moving away too fast.

I’m usually not moved to volunteer anything. I don’t see the point, usually. But this time I said, “I don’t wear anything,” maybe because I wanted to teach Rumlow, who’d never be anything if he didn’t get used to nothing. I showed him my wrists. One was flesh and bare; the other was metal and bare.

Rumlow stared at me and said, “Didn’t think you knew you were an I, Win.”

My name isn’t Win. But people call me all kinds of things and Win made sense. Because this is what I do – I guess I’m a winning card. Though at the time I didn’t think of myself that way.

But you’re wrong if you think I didn’t think of myself. I was an I.

It’s only that an I defined by nothing doesn’t look like an I defined by gold watches, shirts, names. It’s the always-in-the present I. It needs nothing to exist, needs no past, and needs no specific long-term future. It’s marked by whatever the goal of the moment is. To get a glass shard. To escape questioning. It’s the I of the rats on the tracks, that saunter along when there’s no train, and vanish in a second when the lights appear in the tunnel. It’s the I of survival.

I guess that, if this I had a way of ranking all the other kinds of Is – it would list itself as the best. Because it can sense danger, this I. It knows terror. But it never feels terror. It’s never afraid or confused. It’s instinctive. It’ll outlast all other forms of I.

I think it’s the I of the roaches.

-

I’m on the Internet, in leaked documents and shaky camera footage. Conspiracy theorists are trying to reconstruct my history. And ordinary people seem to be picking the history they like best. Some think I’m a committed Nazi. Some like that I’m a committed Nazi. Some say I’m like a serial killer – Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy or something. Give a gun to a white guy, cross-reference with a sense of entitlement, and there you go: this is what our country produces. And some people think I’m a federal employee. This is obviously the natural result of the government seizing power: look what they can unleash on the average person; first it’s the IRS, then it’s this guy.

Some people think all the rumors are true, it is James Barnes, and, more importantly, it’s another hero returned, but this time he wants his own back, this time he’s here to show us where we went wrong, this time he’s angry, he’s crazed, he’s turning on his old masters, he’s lashing out against the system, blindly, the bionic retaliator freed from his programming: he’s hunting down HYDRA bases and HYDRA agents one by one by one by one.

No.

-

Someone was trying to track me. It was annoying. And with all that’s going on in the world, it seems like poor planning.

A month ago there was some upheaval. This is what people should be paying attention to, should be trying to deal with. Ultron. People say Ultron was a world-shaking event.

World-shaking events happen all the time. Maybe a bomb goes off in the desert and kills a little boy. Or in Russia a sinkhole ends a family. Or there’s a disease that swallows up a whole country, and spits out maybe a few people miraculously untouched, except they close their eyes and see their families in rows of bodies ten deep, arranged for mass cremation.

There’s no event that doesn’t shake some world, somewhere. And somewhere else you find maybe two boys walking up the street, kicking trash, laughing, barely aware of the other people on the block, let alone whatever is ending the world somewhere else.

It was me. The world-ending I. I was there for a lot of these. I think I’ve ended the world hundreds of times now. It was never a secret to me that I was doing it. And I think I thought it was natural. Because I can end the world, but miles and miles away, who cares? Who’ll notice?

Lately there’ve been world-ending events that almost everyone notices. In this city they talk about Midtown. The destruction of midtown. I went to see. They’d put everything back up by the time I got there. This is how people really feel about the end of the world: if it doesn’t happen to you, in the end it doesn’t happen. I actually think it’s happened to me — to me, where I wasn’t just the one ending the world but the one being ended – a couple times. But there’s always an I left afterwards, or at least an I now, in the present. So I’m like midtown; I’ve just razed the rubble and recreated the landscape.

Midtown has everyone thinking about other worlds. Lots of people are indignant. If there’s a city beyond a rainbow bridge, what the hell do they think they’re doing, sending one warrior to defend us from a monster they probably created? One? And what about other lifeforms? What about them? What right do they – what right does the universe have to keep going, after a world-ending event occurred here? All of humanity threatened, and these other beings that must be out there – green-skinned, blue-skinned, whatever. They don’t care.

So this is how I guess we know they’re like us. They’re capable of ignoring it all. They’re probably also capable of the dog-misery.

The latest world-ending event wasn’t aliens anyway; it was Ultron. Robots. It passed me by. I mean, all around people were dying, there was a huge threat, and for once I was the untouched person.

I was busy.

When you’ve been through as many of these events as I have, rebuilding is a constant process. And it’s a process of forgetting. So I’d spent years and years forgetting, and when I came to and realized that sometimes I hadn’t been the calamity, but just the person left untouched after the calamity, the person with memories of bodies in rows, I began to want to pick through these bodies.

I did this in many different places. I went to see the State, to his empty house, which is how I have money. I went to see a place in Florida that I know about where there’s a network of graves I put there once; I guess I wanted to make sure I really had been the person I thought I was. When I rediscovered all my old selves it was hard to know which were real – whether the current me was the real one. I decided they were all real anyway; they were all successions of me. Me, then me was razed, then a new me, then me was razed, then a new me.

Eventually I went to Brooklyn. I understand now why they wanted me to see Brooklyn so often. I mean, sometimes the State or other people would arrange things there for me, instructive things, but it was also to check, I think. To make sure I didn’t know anything about the place. They told me once I was free to go – this was a test; they thought I was stupid and didn’t know, but I knew it was a test – and I think they expected me to go to Brooklyn. But I didn’t. I walked down the road somewhere outside Lisbon, maybe; until I reached a train station painted pale pink, where I curled up on a bench and slept until they got me.

They gave me two days on the bench. When they took me in, I went to a different department – this time the man with the monocle – and he asked me questions, and I think he was annoyed. Because I wasn’t under his scope, I was under the State’s, and he didn’t like that. He wanted something to match me. Well, he didn’t have anything. So he tried these tests. If I went to Brooklyn, I guess I would have failed, but it didn’t even occur to me to go to Brooklyn. What was in Brooklyn?

When I’d gone with Rumlow, he’d dragged me up before this house with a yellow door, three brick stories, dormers on top, a chipped stoop, a bathtub in front with dirt inside and some dead plants. Inside the house there was this skinny woman living with her grandmother. They didn’t speak English. Rumlow offered to force his way in, said we could have some fun. I didn’t see the point of that. I didn’t say no, but I didn’t say anything, and then I guess he lost interest.

I can also guess that the yellow door house was my house once. And then my world ended and it wasn’t. I don’t have a house now. I have nothing. And I have to rebuild.

While I was rebuilding people started looking at me strangely. Initially I was mostly pitied, but people were kind to me. These people were just people; they weren’t filed down to instincts and sudden power; they would pass me on the street with all their cloth bags full of vegetables or plastic bags full of clothing or strollers full of babies or whatever they had – all the things they had – and they’d look at me sadly, pitying, because of my arm.

And maybe because I’m a good-looking person even with this arm. I’ve examined myself a little bit, and I’m not ugly, not with clothes on. But you can tell I have nothing, probably.

And then people started to change. I realize now that this had to do with the crowds I would sometimes see huddled up with their phones out, looking scared. But at the time it was only that if they saw the arm first, they’d react. They’d tense up, if they were smart, or say, “Oh shit,” if they weren’t.

Ultron was happening. I had no idea. For once, I was far away from wherever the world was shattering.

-

I sit in the library sometimes and collect piles and piles of personal histories.

I think I was an ordinary person before. But I don’t know what that is. So what does the history of ordinary people look like?

I have a picture of the nurses of Bellevue’s children’s ward, circa nineteen fourteen. I know which one is the most interesting; it’s the tall one. With the dark cap. Her name’s Winnie Halstein. She’s in the census. The skinny blonde with the soiled apron is a less regal-looking nurse; I tell myself this is important, and I start inventing things.

I’ve picked this for today: Winnie was the Head nurse, the one who actually tended to patients, the one who’d been to school (there’s also a picture of her in a Prospect Park charity school in 1903). Sarah had only taken a quick course in nursing. Sarah wasn’t a very good nurse at all, so she was usually scrubbing the floors and cleaning the bedpans – actually, that’s exactly what she’s doing in the 1912 pictures, the ones taken by a charity photographer: they say, “Sarah Callinan, age 15, junior nurse.” But she had empathy for the patients, so she had something. She wasn’t pushed to the point of being a rat or roach person.

But Winifred was the smart one. She married a doctor. Sarah married a skinny little guy who’d stumbled on her one day when he was trying to find the room his sick brother was in (Stephen, 1903-1913; it’s in the records).

Even though they were so different, Sarah and Winifred, they were friends.

So sometimes Winifred’s son would come to meet his mother at the hospital, and she’d point out Sarah’s son, and she’d say, “Be nice to that boy. Do you know I was tending to his uncle when he died here?”

Winnie wasn’t a rat or roach person either.

She’d probably describe the blood that had bubbled up inside the first Stephen, the yellow-green pus that had collected around his throat, the ugly sinking grey underneath his eyes. When people die, they look disgusting. I think a nurse would know that.

Her son would nod. And he’d go talk to the new Stephen, the living one.

Anyway, it probably didn’t happen that way. But I can make it up.

There were almost three hundred girls named Sarah who worked as nurses in the city hospitals in that decade. Forty-seven Dr. George Barneses and twenty-two nurses named Winnie; and close to five hundred people named George and Winifred in the tri-state area who weren’t doctors or nurses at all. There were seven hundred and fifty two Joseph Rogerses in the Eastern United States before the first world war. There were thousands of Steves born in 1918. But there are no Steves born on the fourth of July for that year. Not one.

The flu pandemic messed up a lot of birth certificates, and anyway people would wait a while until after a kid was born, some books say, so that’s probably why.

So I picked these people today. Today, I thought, it was this Winnie. This Sarah. This Steve.

-

Here’s something most people don’t know: there used to be a train stop at Myrtle Avenue. For some of the lines is the last stop in Brooklyn, or it was. It’s a small platform and it’s useless now, because there’s a bigger platform at Dekalb that doesn’t have so many twists and turns leading into it on one end and that doesn’t force the conductors coming out at the other end to take the Manhattan Bridge very fast, which would be dangerous.

It’s not that I remembered the Myrtle Avenue stop. More that I hadn’t realized I’d always known it was there. Three of the entrances were torn down and paved over but the fourth is in a building that still stands, padlocked, with a sign that says it’s the property of the MTA. If you can force it open there’s a stairwell with whorls of graffiti, a colony of feral cats, and then a solid brick wall that someone built to keep anyone going any further. And if you don’t know there’s a station, why would you try to go further?

Sometimes, if you don’t know something is there, you can’t ever find it. Because it won’t occur to you to look for it. When I was still the I of rats and roaches, I was like this. I had parts of me that weren’t totally gone. They were mostly dead, I guess. But I still had a way to access them. I just didn’t know I had a way. Think of it this way: all the old mes were piled up in rows. They weren’t me. But this doesn’t mean I couldn’t identify them, these corpses.

I just didn’t know they were there. Not until he – I’ll get to him – brought one up. He said, “Bucky.” And then later on, after I was trying not to remember that because of the pain, he said, “Pal.”

Bucky and pal are about as good as Win. I don’t hate them. They strike me as old-fashioned.

But they were useful, because they told me that he was inside my head, recognizable, like one of these piled-up bodies. Until then, I’d known him, but I hadn’t bothered to recognize that I’d known him. Like a dog ignoring its owner at the moment, nosing around after a smell instead. And then there came my name, or the name of one of these old corpses, and suddenly I snapped up my head and stopped my dog-life or rat-life. I saw other lives all in rows and I was scared. But now I had my first inkling that more parts of me existed.

And it was like this with Myrtle Avenue. I hadn’t known I’d known it was there. But I did know. And once I knew that I knew, I could shatter the brick wall.

The station has one platform left; the other was destroyed to make the wall of a new tunnel. The tiles are clean enough, the whole thing is supported by unusual round columns, and when the train passes I can hear it rattle behind the wall, but the wall is solid so I don’t see the train progress to the bridge. But there’s a closed-off room at one end of the station that is fairly warm; I sleep there. There’s a bathroom at the other end; I never knew that I knew this, but I did know it: some stations were built with bathrooms. This one has a urinal with a drain, but no water. I shower by walking down to Nevins Street, where there’s a shelter. I never knew about that, but I discovered it when I walked around, trying to see if there was anything else that could tip me off about something I might know.

I spend a lot of time walking.

Whoever was trailing me is still trailing me. If they don’t stop, I’m going to set up explosives in the train station – like I did in Bangkok once for the State.

Then I’ll let them trail me home.

-

Let me tell you about the State.

I call him the State because he used to work at the State Department, and in those days I could actually walk right through his office door to see him. They’d just give me clothes – a black suit, and a black coat, and an ugly tie – and the guy with me then, who was named Gerrison or Gently or something, would handle the security procedures, and then he’d walk me right into where the State was.

There’s a kind of person who leaves no mark on the space around them except exactly what they intend. They’re very efficient, they don’t need a lot, they like clean lines and space, they make no clutter, they always measure out exactly what they need, they always seem to be planning ahead for what’s required.

This is the State.

If you could have seen him in those days, you might’ve fallen in love with him. I didn’t. It’s never occurred to me to fall in love with anybody; in roach-life, you don’t love people as much as just recognize that they exist, which is the closest you can get to them. But people fell in love with the State, probably, because he was handsome, he seemed honest, and he was quick and crisp and clean about everything. He always said direct things, things appropriate for whatever was going on. Little proclamations. These made him sound like the guy in charge, and people liked it so much that eventually he became the guy in charge.

“I’ve got no use for that, Merriman,” or “What’s the bottom line, Cusack?” or “Give me one good reason why I give a damn what Peru thinks about the situation.”

He had the best sense of humor of anybody I’ve ever known. The real shame was that he almost never used it on me. He used it on other people, and then me and Gerrison/Gently and Rumlow or whoever happened to be there wouldn’t be able to say it was a joke, because if we did we’d ruin the joke. Like how once there was a businessman upset over atrocities somewhere east of Warsaw. He published a book on it, and Gerrison/Gently called it a diary of dear Fuckshitslovakia, though that wasn’t the name; they erased the name; I remember some details very keenly whether or not they were the truth, but I rarely get exact names these days, because if I was captured I ought to be able to spill misleading things only, never hard specifics; they erased the hard specifics.

But anyway. The businessman. He was in talk shows, and he had a lot of popular support for this Gesture of Peace he would commit when he could fly back home, which would fix things over there, maybe. And the State was really thrilled about it. He told everyone he was thrilled about it. They put microphones in front of his face and recorded him saying it. Gerrison/Gently showed me news clips of him, everyone asking for his opinion, the businessman standing next to him.

And then the State booked me a flight on the same plane to Fuckshitslovakia, and that was the end of that, so much for bringing peace to Fuckshitslovakia.

Rinse, repeat with the communist sympathizer who wanted to end martial law in the Philippines. Rinse, repeat over and over again with anybody who looked remotely promising for some corner of the world.

So he was a classic comedian, the State. He’d have the set-up: whoever needed to be removed would go into in the public eye. Seen with him. It would be a hope. Some pledge that things would get better. And he’d draw the set-up out, he’d make a lot of noise about it, and people would see he meant well, and so did the U S A.

And then at the end you’d get the punchline: me.

Maybe it’s only funny if you’re already miserable, and acting on instinct. But I don’t think so. We were a sort of creeping infestation of the State Department and we thought it was funny. But plenty of people at the actual State Department thought it was funny, too. They’d come into the blank, bare office sometimes and say, smiling, “Rough luck, Pierce, but come on. You can’t lead a horse to water. You know what these people are like.”

And then the joke would get really funny, because Pierce would hold his hands out and say, “John—“ or whoever it was; he always called people by their first names, except for me; it made them feel like he was intimate with them, maybe; but he was always honest enough that he never did that with me, “—John, I’ve got to try. This nation has a duty.”

And sometimes people would come in and close the door furtively (I was usually in the rear office, in my chair in the dark, not moving, like I was supposed to be; he’d always have a chair for me somewhere even after he moved out of the State Department), and these people would say, “Carter says she’ll take clean-up. But you owe her; you know how she is. She wants no interference on Moscow. She won’t ask questions if she’s got free reign there.”

Or, “Stark says as long as he gets the results of how the TEC-173 functions on impact; that’s the most important thing. Whatever else happened, as long as your guy used that, it doesn’t matter, so much. He thinks the TEC-173 is the real predictor here.”

Or, “Fury will want to know why there’s no trail, you know. I don’t think your agents bother him; he likes when you compartmentalize, it makes him feel like everything’s going to plan. But he expects to be able to come up with their identities himself. Maybe feed him somebody. He won’t care what happened as long as he thinks he knows who did it.”

And then the State would laugh and laugh.

See, other people were in on the joke, too. These people: Carter, Stark, Fury. They were setting things up, drawing them out, carrying them to perfection, and making their own jokes. They just didn’t know the punchline was me. They didn’t mind the punchline either way. It was everybody’s punchline; everyone could find the humor in it, the bright side to the situation, whether it was Fuckshitslovakia or the Phillippines that was taking the blow this time.

Honestly, if he hadn’t been HYDRA, but had just been the U S A (and I guess he was that, too; he was the truest, bluest, cleanest, most U S A person I ever knew), he probably would have gotten away with it all. I mean, remove the tenuous link to HYDRA. And then who’d care? Not any of these people.

I think he died laughing about that; I think he thought it was funny. It is, a little.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before _Agent Carter_ came out. Sorry about the first person. It was interesting to think about the WS in the first person, and for that matter about the WS on hiatus during Age of Ultron.


End file.
